Daily Scifi Shorts, Sketches, & Starts

Saturday, October 18

Nestor sat on a bench intended for riders waiting on a bus--that much he knew--and wondered what to do now. Everything was going wrong on this trip.
    The last time he had been here had been 1952. Everyone was speaking German, as they were supposed to be, the gambling and drinking were in full swing, and he had intersected with his target, made the observation, and filed his report--just as he had practiced. Of course, the simulators weren't perfect. The calculators had to make certain assumptions that had a probability of error, but they got most things right. Usually.
    This time, though, the reality he found himself in was not what the simula y or had prepared him for, not what he had practiced.
    For one thing, it was October 2014, not December.  That was not too bad--as long as he was before the target date, he could wait things out. His implant was malfunctioning, stuck in a downstream loop, unresponsive to the blink, and this was a much bigger problem. Without the implant, he would not be able to access information from his own time, decode scrambles, or summon his own pickup. He wouldn't eveneed be able to recognize his target without the overlay that his implant provided--or would provide, had it been working.
    A tired-looking woman bundled in an overcoat that seemed to heavy for the warm morning sat down on the other end of his bench. She looked around, frowned, and pulled the overcoat tighter around her. If Nestor's implant could have overlaid the woman, provided him with a name, history, genealogy up and down the timestream--and waved him off if she was somebody's pivot. Without that information, it would be risky to do much of anything here, he knew.
    That was dangerous, but more bewildering was the unanticipated aspects of the reality he'd been thrust into. First of all, everyone was speaking English, an odd little language from some islands off the northern coast of Europe. Why these people should be speaking that of all things was a mystery. These people--every one of them, as far as he could tell, had small devices that glowed and chirped and through which they could pass oral and written messages. Chirping and glowing were not a problem for him; neither were the messages. But the devices seemed to contain a visual recorder, and the people all seemed very eager to so record. He'd at first tried to be aware of when and from where one of the devices were pointed at him, but he very quickly realized there was nothing he could do to prevent his own image from being recorded, and this would cause problems downstream. Finally, he came to the conclusion that the best way to avoid being recorded was to blend in, be uninteresting and unremarkable--and so he had sat on this bench.
    A large machine lumbered to a stop a T the curb before him and the got diesel exhaust enveloped him. It was only a second or two at most. The woman in the overcoat frowned, scowled at him, then got on the bus. A moment later, a round human in clothes that seemed too small and some sort of round hat was staring at him. "You gonna get on the bus?" he said--in English.
    Not knowing what else to do, Nestor got on the bus.